


A Longer Long Distance

by LienidQueen



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Astronaut! Bellamy, F/M, Long Distance Sucks, Lots of Angst, NASA, Restaurant! Clarke, The Delinquents are Space Kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 01:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14485932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LienidQueen/pseuds/LienidQueen
Summary: Clarke met Bellamy when he was an astronaut-in-training, but now he's off to the International Space Station for a six month mission.There's long distance, and then there's *long distance*.*Inspired by the season premiere in that Bellamy's in space and their relationship is messed up because of it. Modern AU because that's all I can write*





	A Longer Long Distance

It never seemed like much. Always something in the future, but not _soon_. It was easy to pretend that he wouldn’t have to leave.

 _I mean, how many astronauts are actually on missions at any given time?_ Clarke would rationalize.

But she should have known better. She’s lived in the Clear Lake side of Houston ever since she dropped out of her fancy Ivy League college and was excommunicated from the Griffin clan. She could see the Johnson Space Center from Arcadia’s back porch, glowing in the setting sun.

Having nearly no marketable skills when she landed in the outer Houston area six years ago, it was practically a miracle she worked her way up to running the best restaurant in town on behalf of the owner Indra. Arcadia was the only Greek restaurant in ten miles, but it was delicious. The dolma and saginaki were addicting. It was convenient for a cheese addict to have such gooey flaming dairy at her beck and call.

Arcadia was on the other side of Clear Lake from the Johnson Space Center, which meant two things: every time NASA announced a new space team mission the entire world would descend on Clear Lake & the Space Center for tours and photo ops, and most of the astronauts had standing tables in the back.

* * *

_Five Years Earlier_

When she first started working at Arcadia as a tragic excuse for a waitress, she thought astronauts were these Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong types. She always pictured these stodgy, middle-aged baldies, drinking beers and talking about the good old days. Instead, she was confronted with real astronauts. The ones in training, at least.

They were nuts. Truly. That sweltering August after the newest Astronaut Class started training, Indra reserved one of the big tables in the back room for “NASA Astronaut Class of 2013”, and instructed Clarke to get the poor suckers whatever they needed. She learned later that Indra did this every four years for each incoming class.

Clarke had been in Clear Lake and working at Arcadia for around a year at this point, but nothing prepared her for the arrival of the new class. On the first day, all twelve recruits shuffled through Arcadia’s front door and beelined for the table, ordering a round of margaritas over their shoulder. Never mind that this was a Greek restaurant. Clarke remembered what Indra said though, and found the tequila stash under the bar and made a batch anyway.

When she approached the table with the pitcher and a fleet of glasses, she was met with applause. These people weren’t like the astronauts of memory. These were people around her age, infinitely more accomplished than she could hope to be, laughing and teasing with stacks of aerospace manuals scattered around them. They were youthful and bright, full of smiles and excitement about their journey ahead.

Clarke had other tables that night, so she kept a loose eye on the table, bringing out some hummus and pita when they started to look a little peckish. They went through three pitchers of margaritas that night, but mostly she kept out of their way.

When Indra asked how they were, Clarke told her to start stocking margarita ingredients. Indra laughed and told her the last class had an addiction to cheesecake. It was always something.

A week later the sign reserving the table for “NASA Astronaut Class of 2013” had been corrected to read “Delinquent Class of 2013”, having something to do with a prank pulled in their first week that went awry. After a few weeks attendance fluctuated, with usually only six or so of them coming in a night. Mondays seemed to be an event akin to “family meal”, as all twelve would show up.

* * *

On a normal Wednesday, six of the “Delinquents” were sprawled out on their reserved table, big stacks of books and notes spread in every direction. Clarke approached with their standard pitcher of margaritas and spanakopita.

“The Margarita Queen has arrived,” one of them grinned, looking up from his mess of papers, and all six quickly shuffled their stuff to make space on the table for it. She was pretty sure his name was Monty, but their annoying bro-habit of calling each other by their last names made it hard to be sure. His last name was definitely Green.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not the queen,” Clarke told him. “Indra’s the queen. She’s always the queen.”

“Princess, then,” the guy they called Blake answered, smirking at her from under his mop of curly hair. Clarke gave a mock curtsey and rolled her eyes.

“Clarke,” she returned. There was no way someone was going to call her “princess”. She was a grown-ass woman.

“Raven Reyes,” one of the two women at the table introduced herself. She had a fierce vibe to her, like you could cut yourself on her insults.

Blake offered no response. Looking over Monty’s shoulder, there were some crazy equations and math scrawled all over the pages.

“So you’re all geniuses, right?” Clarke asked, pouring out the glasses and distributing. Raven snorted.

“Some of us are,” she scoffed. “Some people don’t understand molecular engineering.”

She seemed to be directing that comment at Blake and the big guy next to him named Miller. Clarke was surprised he would even fit in a space shuttle. He was built like a monster truck.

“I have a masters in aeronautical engineering,” Blake shot back, to which Raven only cackled.

“Who doesn’t?” Raven scoffed.

“Just because you’re the first quadruple specialty in the program’s history—“

“—With three commendations,“ she interjected.

“—does not make you better than us,” Miller finished, taking a large bite of spanakopita for emphasis.

“I’m pretty sure it does, cupcake,” Raven teased. Miller threw his straw wrapper at her head.

“Ignore them, Rae,” the other girl—Maya, maybe?—told her. “They’re just jealous.”

“Jealous my ass,” Miller mumbled.

“So you’re in the military?” Clarke asked.

Blake snorted. “Can you imagine Green and Jordan in the Academy?”

“I resent that,” Jordan retorted. Jordan seemed to be Monty’s mad-scientist other half, with a pair of goggles perpetually perched on his messy hair as they detailed organic compounds.

“Maya, Jasper, and Monty are civilians,” Raven explained to her, pointing out the three at the end. If Clarke were to guess, she would have assumed they weren’t part of any military force. They seemed too…cerebral. “Miller, Blake, and I met in the Air Force. Murphy and McIntyre are from Navy, but all the rest of our class are civilians.”

“Nate,” Miller affirmed, offering her hand.

“Bellamy,” Blake added, giving her a nod.

There was something incredibly magnetic about Bellamy Blake. Not just his role as the group’s de-facto leader, though that was often challenged by the headstrong Raven, but the softness in his eyes and mischievous quirk of his mouth. He had this aura that made her want to curl up in the sound of his voice.

“Sit down, stay a while,” Raven prodded, and Clarke was shocked out of her absent staring at Bellamy. That was going to have to stop, she chided herself. _Don’t be a weirdo._

Clarke stuttered, “Oh no, I have other tables to—“

“Just sit for a minute,” Bellamy told her, not even looking up from his mechanical charts. She would have been touched if he didn’t sound completely bored by the prospect. “Be a rubber duck for Green and Jordan. They hit a wall in their chain reaction.”

“Their what?”

* * *

It turned out that the rubber duck was an technique Monty and Jasper picked up from their old friends in coding at MIT. Computer programmers would explain their coding systems to a rubber duck, and in explaining it to someone or something, they would find the faults in their programming. When she first found this out, she was a little offended, but she got over it. As the weeks went by, she played the “simpleton” to their educational achievements, watching them master different aeronautical theories and technical solutions.

She was basically a stand-in for a child’s bath toy. But it was fascinating to listen to all of them explain their systems and research to her. Despite what Raven suggested weeks before, they were all geniuses. Her arguments with the normal people at Arcadia usually consisted of the merits of Beyoncé or _The Road to El Dorado_. With the Delinquents, they got into shouting matches about wind resistance and proper landing gear protocols. And _The Road to El Dorado_ too, sometimes.

Even though she always felt very, very dumb at their table, they made her feel valued.

* * *

_Five Years Later_

“You won’t forget me, Rae, will you?” Clarke asked, looking into the backseat where Raven was squished between Jasper and Monty.

Her best friend just laughed, the carefree laughter that erupts when it’s beautiful outside and you’re driving down the highway with the windows down. They were rolling down the interstate, on the last leg of a road trip to deliver Raven and Bellamy to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral for their very first space mission. Of their entire training class, Raven and Bellamy were the first to receive their space mission assignments. Jasper and Monty were still parsing out their research for entropy transference, but they all decided to trip down to Florida to see their compatriots of “Team Delinquent” off.

“Clarke, I couldn’t forget you if I tried. You know I’m going up into space with Bellamy, right? The man can’t go ten minutes without talking about you. Our simulations have basically been Clarke Griffin Fan Club Meetings for two months straight,” Raven assured her, and the man behind the wheel turned just a little red.

No one was more surprised than Clarke to be dating Bellamy. The enigmatic but charming leader of the training class didn’t give her the time of day for the majority of their first year in training. Raven and Clarke became fast friends and eventual roommates, but Bellamy still acted like she was a hanger-on to their escape to the skies. It was only after a contentious game of Settlers of Catan when both revealed their cutthroat competitive instinct that they became friends in earnest.

Raven always teased her when Clarke would say, “one thing just led to another”. She always pretended to be affronted, since the whole crew participated in months-long, behind-the-scenes machinations to force the two together. Her matchmaking instinct, while impeccable, was so subtle that it truly felt like the universe to Clarke rather than her incredibly nosy friends.

 _But this man_ , Clarke thought. Bellamy was incredible. He was an incredible leader to the whole crew, and one of the kindest men she had ever met, first impressions notwithstanding. His grumpy outer shell eroded quickly once they were friends, and was basically nonexistent once they started dating. Miller teased him that Clarke was the only person that could melt him instantly, and Bellamy would argue except that it was completely true.

“You know you’re not allowed to forget me either, right?” Clarke asked, putting her hand over his on the gearshift.

“Princess, this isn’t the fifties. We have wifi. We’re going to be closer to the wifi than you are,” he told her.

“Even I know that’s not the same thing, dummy. I know your transmission’s based in radio waves.”

“Would you look at that, Blake? This lady knows a thing or two!” Raven cheered, slapping Clarke a high five.

“You know what I mean,” Bellamy insisted, and his face softened as he looked at her.

“I know,” Clarke assured him.

“Good.”

The next morning ungodly early, as Raven and Bellamy were heading for the launch site, Clarke stopped him before he put on his shoes.

“Hey,” she whispered, still too early to crack the peace of pre-dawn.

“Hey,” he smiled back.

“You know I was serious about what I said yesterday, right?”

“That you think the _Emperor’s New Groove_ is the most underrated animated Disney movie? Yeah, I believed you the first time,” he chuckled.

“No,” she sighed, exasperated. Clarke took his face in her hands. He had grown some scruff in the last few months from a combination of stress and lack of sleep. He looked really good in it. She didn’t hate it, but it was giving her some killer chafe on her thighs. “You’re not allowed to forget about me. I know being hundreds of miles above the world can give you perspective, and I’m all for you getting perspective on the world from high above it, as long as your perspective doesn’t recognize that you’re too good for a restaurant manager from Houston.”

Now it was Bellamy’s turn to take her face in his hands. He rubbed his thumb across her cheek, tracing the smattering of freckles she’d earned from cleaning up the apartment’s vegetable garden last week.

“Clarke,” he whispered, saying her name like a prayer, “there is nothing in any star or planet that could keep me from loving you. The universe is infinite, but everything I could ever need is between my two hands right now.”

“Asshole,” she swore, tears pricking her eyes. “You can’t say that shit right before you’re going to leave the planet for six months. Now I’m going to sob through the entire launch sequence.”

“It’s only six months,” Bellamy reassured her. “People do long distance all the time. This is just like my sister and her fancy chef boyfriend when he lived in New Orleans for a year to study with that doughnut guy.”

Clarke laughed in spite of the tears still dripping down her face. “He was not a doughnut guy. Just because all you ate was beignets when you and O visited does not mean he was studying with a doughnut guy. He was training with a Beard-awarded chef.”

“Fine. But those doughnuts were amazing.”

“This is not the same though,” Clarke insisted. “O could drive to visit Lincoln. If I miss you, I can’t just go to where you are.”

“I know. But it will all be okay. Remember, you signed up for this,” he added with a cocky grin.

“Shut up,” Clarke retorted, wiping her face with the back of her hand and giving him a kiss.

“Hey now,” Bellamy said, finishing his shoes and grabbing his bag. “I’m leaving the planet for six months and you give me a little peck on the cheek? Come on.”

With that he took hold of her hips and dragged her to him, strong arms tightening around her back and kissing her soundly, morning breath and all. It was long and exaggerated. The kind of kiss Clarke imagined women in the forties would give their husbands before they went off to war. Considering Bellamy’s love of history and completely gooey center, she was certain that he was using every ounce of self-restraint he had to keep himself from dipping her.

“Bell,” she broke away for a moment, but was pulled back for another kiss, “Bell, seriously. You need to go. Raven’s waiting in the van.”

“Fine,” he said, untangling himself but staying in her personal space. “But know I’ll be thinking about you every minute.”

“Me too,” she confirmed, and he finally took his pack and left the room.

* * *

Thinking about each other every minute turned out to be harder than expected.

Bellamy was incredibly busy on his ISS mission, so even though he had access to email and a phone, his opportunities to call her or answer messages were few and far between. He was helping to update the mechanics of the space station’s solar paneling and power systems, and in order to finish on time by the end of his time in space, he had to work a lot. Almost all the time.

Bellamy always responded to the emails in the beginning, never letting a day or two go by before answering or checking in. But as he started to get crunched for time and one of his updated panels started to fritz, he went a whole week without talking to Clarke.

She wasn’t exactly blameless either. Right after Bellamy left the planet, Indra decided to take a three-month retreat to Nepal. It was an amazing opportunity, and Clarke had never seen Indra, dare she say, _chipper_ , as when she was packing for that retreat. But it meant that Clarke was truly the owner/operator of Arcadia for three months.

It was great to keep her busy, so she didn’t wallow in missing Bellamy, but she was also slammed all the time. There is a reason that restaurant owners have a manager. Clarke was getting five hours sleep a night, spending every waking hour trying to keep Arcadia from flying off track. The entire span of her existence narrowed to making sure that the produce got delivered on time and facilitating every Greek celebration in a thirty-mile-radius. Responding to emails from Bellamy became the thing she would get to as soon as she finished this other _very important argument with their distributor_ or set up Macy’s maternity leave cover.

When she finally had a moment to herself, she usually fell asleep. Three times in one week she sat down to write a response to his email and fell asleep with her laptop on her chest. Because she felt terrible delaying her response, the actual email she managed to send was three times longer than her usual, full of hollow cheeriness and endearments. She felt like shit about it, but there wasn’t any bandwidth left in her brain to dwell on his intergalactic adventures. The leaking bathroom sink in the women’s restroom was plenty of an adventure for her at the moment.

* * *

“I just miss you,” Bellamy said, smiling softly through the video chat on her computer. His beard had filled in whilst in space, and he looked older. More weary.

“I miss you too,” Clarke replied automatically. In truth, she had completely forgotten about their scheduled video chat until her computer started beeping. She had been updating inventories on her laptop, nearly pulling her hair out because of an olive shortage in one of their deliveries. Her chest had panged when she realized she forgot.

“I haven’t heard from you in like two weeks.”

This was not helping her feel better. Sure, she hadn’t responded to his email about this crazy solar flare he saw the other day, but to be fair, solar flares weren’t the top of her priorities at the moment.

“You know it’s confirmation season. Do you know how many separate confirmation celebrations we’ve catered at Saint Kyranna’s in the past week? I’m drowning in ouzo and baklava,” she told him. As she said it, though, she began to doubt she had actually mentioned it to him. She had been in so deep with the staff getting all the catering orders planned it must have slipped her mind.

“So? It’s not every day I’m in space,” he teased lightly, but it set something off in her.

“It kinda is,” Clarke snapped. “You’ve been gone for two months, and I’m completely swamped at work. It’s not like we would have seen much of each other if you were home anyway.”

“Sure, this is my fault. I should have never gone to the ISS,” he scoffed. “God forbid I actually achieve something with my years of training.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. My job is a lot of responsibility, especially with Indra gone—“

“Come on, Clarke, it’s just Arcadia. It’s not—“ But he cut himself off, obviously thinking better of it.

“It’s not what? Rocket science?” Clarke spat, venom dripping from every word.

She could see onscreen as Bellamy’s brows furrowed and he put his head in his hands. For a moment neither said anything.

“Clarke,” Bellamy started, her name full of remorse.

“No, I get it. I’m just the dumb girl from Texas who you settled for while you waited for your big job opportunity—“

“Clarke,” he tried again, “It’s three am on the space station. I have to be up at seven. Can we have this fight another time?”

“We’re already having this fight, Bell. It’s in progress.”

“It’s just that,” Bellamy sighed, “everyone’s asleep right now, and I don’t want to wake them up. I can call you tomorrow, and we can talk about this then.”

Ice coursed through her veins. “I wouldn’t want to bother any of the geniuses in their precious REM sleep.”

“Clarke, come on, please. I’ve been working for the last eighteen hours straight. I can’t even—“

“I’m an inconvenience to you, aren’t I?”

“What? No, Clarke—“

“Your life would be so much simpler if you didn’t have to check in with that hick girlfriend of yours—“

“Clarke, you know that’s not what I—“

“I won’t bother you anymore,” Clarke interrupted.

“Clarke—“ Bellamy’s voice shifted, turning softer.

“What? I’m obviously not good enough for you. Raven’s up there with you, why don’t you just bang her instead.”

She knew she was poking at sore spots. She knew it was petty. But she just couldn’t help herself. It was like word vomit. Angry, insecure word vomit.

“Fine.” It was a simple word. So much sadness and frustration was packed into such a small, insignificant word.

“Fine,” she heard herself echo.

With that, the video link went dead.

She had won the argument. So why did she still feel like shit?

Clarke felt an ache take hold in her chest, something sucking her innards out with a straw. She almost wanted to cry, and pressed her palms into her eyes to push it, but nothing came out. She felt like a hollow shell, sitting in her desk chair, staring at the screen where Bellamy’s sad face used to be.

* * *

When she arrived at Arcadia the next morning, Monty and Jasper were standing in front of the back office, matching expressions of determination.

“What do you want?” Clarke asked, too weary to bother with greetings. She had been up most of the night in frustration, trying desperately to feel anything but empty inside.

“You don’t Dear John an astronaut, Clarke,” Monty told her matter-of-factly.

“What?” she asked, not quite paying attention.

“Dumping an astronaut in space is like a hundred times worse than dumping a soldier at war,” Jasper added, and everything came into focus.

“Who told you that?”

“Raven called us this morning. Apparently Bellamy’s been insufferable for six hours.”

If Bellamy told Raven, there was no way he told her what she said. There was no way that Raven knew her petty killshot and hadn’t immediately ripped Clarke out for it. At the very least, she felt bad about that. Not about the argument, because he was being rude, but she knew she had no right to bring Raven into it.

When they first started dating, Bellamy told her about this terrible night in the Academy. It was the day he found out his mother had been shot and killed in the old neighborhood, and Octavia had been taken into the system. Raven came to check on him and things spiraled from there. Within twenty-four hours the two had decided it was an event never to be repeated, and their close, _platonic_ , relationship had endured ever since.

That night had been Bellamy’s worst, and she had no right to remind him of that, even if she was feeling foolish and hurt. She knew she was wrong to do that. But her heart was still aching from the things he had said. She had no right to bring that night into this, but he had confirmed her darkest fears about their relationship—that she would never be smart enough. She knew she was the dummy of the group, hanging with people whose mean education was several masters degrees more than her half-completed bachelor’s. But she thought he didn’t care about that.

“Serves him right,” she said, dropping her bag on the desk.

“You can’t break up with him while he’s in space,” Monty told her.

“And why the hell not? He’s being an asshole,” she retorted. “Just because I’m not curing cancer or fixing the space station doesn’t mean what I do isn’t important.”

She could not believe that they were taking his side. But again, she could. They were all the geniuses. Of course they wouldn’t understand feeling cranially inadequate.

“So work through it. Don’t just bail. He’s locked in space. He can’t do all that grand romantic gesture shit he’s really good at,” Jasper reminded her, but she was having none of it.

“If he wishes to discuss it, he can email me. But I’m not the one that needs to apologize.”

With that she passed them into her office, dropping her bag on the desk and starting in on the pile of paperwork that had accumulated since her departure last night. After a minute of ignoring them, Monty and Jasper ambled away, likely towards the Delinquent table, muttering something about morons.

* * *

They were both too goddamn proud. It was a character fault they shared, something that their friends mocked when it got in the way of group harmony. If they were all in the same town, much less the same planet, their friends would sit the two of them down and hold an intervention until they had an attitude adjustment. That was harder to accomplish when the group was fractured hundreds of miles apart.

Instead, Clarke stuck to her guns and insisted that she would not contact Bellamy first, since he was the instigator in their fight and obviously in the wrong. No one would convince her otherwise. Weeks passed as she focused on her terrestrial existence rather than those in the sky. Indra returned from her retreat more zen than before, if that was even possible. Pleased by the way Clarke had handled Arcadia in her absence, she made Clarke a co-owner, which meant that Clarke’s workload hadn’t diminished with Indra’s return. If anything, it increased. Which meant Clarke had little time to dwell on Spaceman himself.

On the flipside, Raven informed Clarke via several aggressive phone calls that Bellamy was waiting for her to apologize for the shitty things she had said.

“Just apologize, you pigheaded dumbass,” Raven told her for the sixth time this video chat.

“Why do I need to apologize again? He’s the one who called me dumb.”

“Apparently you called him a slut, so I’d call it a wash.”

“I did not,” Clarke insisted. Not technically, anyway.

“I don’t know,” Raven replied. “He wouldn’t tell me exactly what you said, but he’s pretty beaten down about it. Keeps sighing dramatically and all.”

“How the hell do you think I feel? I’m not some placeholder girlfriend he can just use for emotional stability while he waits for the perfect combination doctoral-candidate-and-model to appear.”

“Jesus, Clarke,” Raven muttered. “You need to get over your complex. None of us think you’re a moron. Least of all your boyfriend.”

“ _Ex_ -boyfriend,” Clarke corrected. She knew she was being petty. She thrived on her pettiness. It was like a treasured houseplant.

“Clarke, stop it. He’s sorry. You’re sorry. It’s been a month and a half. Stop being dumbasses and get over yourselves.”

“Him first.”

Raven sighed. “That’s it. I’m done. I love you, lady, but I can’t do this anymore today. Talk to him, or don’t talk to him. But you’re both driving me crazy.”

Clarke started to say goodbye and then stopped, something else sticking in her chest.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this hard,” she whispered. It was a confession, an apology, a recognition of her own frustration and wrongness. Then Raven surprised her, starting to laugh.

“Did you think it was going to be cupcakes and rainbows?” she asked. “It’s long distance. Even with no issues, it’s a shit show.”

“I just don’t know what to do.” With all the wild things happening to her right now, astronaut-boyfriend-notwithstanding, she needed something to hold on to. Ever since their fight she’d been untethered.

“It’s been over a month. We’re coming down in two weeks. You need to talk to him.”

“But how?” She could hear how weak she sounded and hated herself for it.

“Video chat him at six. He’ll be free. I’ll make sure he answers.”

At six on the dot Clarke’s nervous fingers pressed the enter key and issued a video request to her intergalactic semi-ex-boyfriend. She would speak to him like a person, and they would work their shit out. They would talk, and come to an understanding about their separate perspectives, and she would reserve her emotions until after they figured things out.

It was a nice plan, anyway. As soon as the video link connected and his face showed on the screen though, Clarke started crying. Big hacking sobs that made her body shake, and she couldn’t speak.

He looked like shit. That wasn’t hyperbole; that was honest truth. The man had let his hot scruff grow out into an unruly beard. His eyes had deep circles like he hadn’t been sleeping, and the weariness that she had seen in their last video over a month ago had exaggerated to full-blown exhaustion. He looked broken, like how she had felt for over a month. So she lost it.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized immediately in between sobs, desperate to be the first to apologize. Funny how the tables turn when faced with your own brokenness.

Her video must have loaded quicker than his, because the moment after she said it, his face lit up and then furrowed—overjoyed by seeing her face and then worried about what had happened to it.

“Clarke, what?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, wheezing only a little.

Bellamy jumped in. “Clarke no, _I’m_ sorry. I shouldn’t have—“

“Bellamy I shouldn’t have—“

“I love you.”

Clarke imagined this was what getting hit in the head felt like. Suddenly she stopped crying, stopped stuttering, stopped breathing. One thing kept circling her head like cartoon birds— _I love you, I love you, I love you_.

“Clarke?” he asked softly.

His voice was hoarse. Why was his voice hoarse? He shouldn’t be yelling in space. What did he have to yell about? Was he dehydrated? Dehydration could make the vocal cords rough. Did he need to drink more water—

“Clarke?” he repeated.

“I love you too,” she rushed. His face softened. He lost his rougher edges.

“Clarke, I love you so much, and I’m sorry. I’ve been training my whole life for this, but I didn’t expect to feel so cramped in. I shouldn’t have taken that out on you. I should _never_ take that out on you. You have to believe me, I didn’t mean anything by anything. I miss you so much I’ve been going out of my mind without you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” Clarke replied once air started circulating in her lungs again. “I shouldn’t have hurt you like I did. I’m sorry too.”

For a minute they just stared at each other, soft smiles tucked in the corners of each mouth. It was then that she knew they would be okay. Not right now, but soon.

“Tell me about space, flyboy.”

* * *

“Clarke, slow the hell down!”

“Don’t you dare tell me to slow down, Montgomery Green! They are coming out of security any minute,” Clarke hollered over her shoulder, elbowing her way through the crowds at the Houston International Airport.

Raven and Bellamy had fallen down twenty-four hours ago, and after several hours of debrief, acclimation, and one long flight from Florida, they were finally back home. And Clarke was damned if she wasn’t the first thing Bellamy was going to see when he came out of the gate.

Monty and Jasper, long since fallen behind, made feeble attempts to slow her down, but she was not to be messed with. She reached the automatic doors where the arrivals spit out, eyes scanning intently for that familiar build.

Good thing she didn’t have to wait long. Shortly after landing in front of the doors, her spaceman walked through them, NASA windbreaker on and duffel tossed over the shoulder casually—like he went on space missions every day. He looked the same as she last saw him, on video two days ago, but this time he was real. She launched herself at him.

In retrospect she probably looked like a crazy person. Here was this tall, confident man sauntering out of security and a compact ball of energy collided head-on. But after the initial impact shocked him, Clarke felt Bellamy drop his bag and wrap his arms around her waist, lifting her into the air and swinging her around.

“I missed you, I missed you, I love you, I love you,” she repeated, over and over into the crook of his neck, feeling more and more secure in his embrace the longer they were wrapped together.

“I love you too, Princess,” he chuckled, in that effortlessly charming inflection that made her knees go weak.

“You’re not allowed to leave me again,” she told him.

“Sure thing. Until next time I have to go be in space,” he reminded her.

“Long distance sucks,” Clarke declared. Bellamy just laughed, holding her tightly like she was the only thing holding him to the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> For Lauren, as always.
> 
> Kudos & Review friends, they're more than discontinued granola bars and musical showcases.


End file.
